75to have had a positive affect on her literary career.
Between 1909 and 1913, Sui Sin Far was able to
place stories in Independent, Hampton’s, Delineator,
Good Housekeeping, and New England Magazine,
thereby clearly establishing herself in the literary
marketplace of the East. In 1912 A. C. McClurg
brought out Sui Sin Far’s first book, Mrs. Spring
Fragrance, to generally favorable reviews.
Unfortunately Sui Sin Far’s career was cut
short just as she was reaping the rewards of a life
spent in pursuit of literary success. Shortly after
the publication of Mrs. Spring Fragrance, Sui Sin
Far disappeared from the literary scene. She died
a few years later in 1914 at the age of 49, after a
heart condition forced her to return to Montreal
for medical treatment. Her obituary notes that she
was working on a long novel when she died, but to
date scholars have been unable to locate this un-
published work. Even though she was fairly well
known in her own time, after her death Sui Sin Far
was virtually forgotten. The revival of her literary
reputation in the 1980s and 1990s is a result of the
efforts of scholars of Asian-American literature
such as Amy Ling and S. E. Solberg. The exhaustive
research of Annette White-Parks, Sui Sin Far’s con-
temporary biographer, and recent scholarly work
on Sui Sin Far have helped to secure her place in
the history of American literature.
Bibliography
Far, Sui Sin. Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings,
edited by Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks. Ur-
bana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.
Ferens, Dominika. Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chi-
natown Missions and Japanese Romances. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2002.
Ling, Amy. “Edith Eaton: Pioneer Chinamerican
Writer and Feminist.” American Literary Realism
16 (Autumn 1893): 287–298.
Solberg, E. E. “Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton: The First
Chinese American Fictionist.” MELUS 8 (Spring
1981): 27–37.
White-Parks, Annette. Sui Sin Far/ Edith Maude
Eaton: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1995.
Rachel IharaFarewell to Manzanar
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston (1973)
JEANNE WAKATSUKI HOUSTON’s memoir of her
family’s two-and-a-half-year incarceration in the
World War II internment camp at Manzanar is one
of Asian-American literature’s best-known books.
Since its first publication, it has gone through
60 editions and sold more than 1.5 million cop-
ies. The book is assigned regularly in high school
and college courses, and is excerpted in dozens
of anthologies of women’s and ethnic American
writing.
Jeanne Wakatsuki was seven years old in 1942
when her family was interned at Manzanar, in
Southern California near the Nevada border, and
10 years old when they were released. With the
assistance of her husband, writer James D. Hous-
ton, Jeanne began tape-recording her recollections
of that experience in the late 1960s. In the early
1970s, Jeanne and James began conducting his-
torical research and interviews with other family
members and internment survivors. Those tapes
and notes provided the raw material for Farewell to
Manzanar, which announces itself on the title page
as “A true story of Japanese American experience
during and after the World War II internment.”
Though not the first Japanese-American au-
tobiography to discuss the internment—MON-
ICA SONE’s 1953 Nisei Daughter predates it by 20
years—Farewell to Manzanar was the first to focus
on the internment as its central dramatic event.
Jeanne’s memoir opens on the morning of the
Pearl Harbor attack, which, she writes, “snipped
[our life] off, stopped it from becoming whatever
else lay ahead” (40). The book’s early chapters al-
ternately discuss the initial phases of internment,
the emigration of her father, Ko, to California from
Japan in 1904, and the Wakatsuki family’s prewar
life in California. The Wakatsukis are a close, if not
particularly intimate, family, held together in large
part by the strength of Ko’s belligerent personality.
However, Ko’s arrest on false espionage charges in
the days after Pearl Harbor forces his wife, Riku,
and their children to adjust their family dynamics
in his absence.
There are two primary narratives in Farewell to
Manzanar. The first concerns the slow erosion ofFarewell to Manzanar 75